Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1) (6 page)

CHAPTER 7

Saturday nights always kept LDWF enforcement agents busy, so nothing about the evening had surprised Gentry. People drank and hunted, drank and fished, or drank and steered boats around the parish waterways like they were nautical bumper cars. Sometimes they smoked crystal meth, argued, and shot each other, but that was the sheriff’s problem—unless it happened while they also were hunting, fishing, or boating.

Gentry and Jena had already hauled out of Lake Gero two guys who’d run their boat onto the bank and were still sitting in the half-submerged hull arguing about who was at fault. The agents had issued four other DUIs and had impounded two boats no one was sober enough to drive. They’d fished a poodle out of Bayou Dulac. They’d caught a boater with enough marijuana to make him a Colorado millionaire, and turned him and his stash over to the sheriff, along with a semiautomatic and high-capacity magazine.

Now, at midnight, they were headed back to the boat launch to get in their respective trucks and spend a few hours doing paperwork.

Except Gentry had something on his mind, and he’d put it off as long as he could. They’d exchanged their usual banter tonight, neither of them mentioning Eva Savoie or the murder case. Gentry had no intention of discussing how much he’d been thinking about Ceelie Savoie and her sexy voice. He did have an agenda related to the case, though.

“Hold up, Red,” he said after they’d gotten the boat hitched to the back of his truck and stashed their gear. “You still got some contacts at NOPD?”

Jena leaned against her truck, her face shadowed in the dark parking lot lit by a single streetlight. “Depends on why you’re asking. What’s up?”

“I want to look at the paperwork on a closed case from a few years back.”

Jena crossed her arms. “You worked in Orleans Parish long enough to know they’d let you look at a closed case file if you asked. You were Wildlife and Fisheries, but you worked with the police force a lot. What are you not telling me?”

“I need it to be under the radar.” Gentry tried to read her expression for any sign of suspicion, but couldn’t see well enough. Plus, she was good at keeping a blank expression; he bet the NOPD had hated to lose her.

“Gentry, I won’t do it unless you tell me what you’re up to.” Yep, she was definitely suspicious. “Does this have anything to do with Eva Savoie?”

He needed to trust her, but could he? He trusted her with his life on the job every night they partnered together, but could he trust her with his secrets? Especially this secret?

“You can talk to me, you know. Partner-partner privilege.”

He chuckled. “You mean like doctor-patient or attorney-client privilege?”

“Something like that.” She wasn’t laughing.

He took a deep breath and plunged into the bayou of trust. It was deep, and its waters swift and dangerous. “I want to look at the files of the last case I worked in Orleans Parish. An interagency drug-smuggling case.”

“The one where your brother was involved?”

They’d never discussed it, but he should’ve realized she’d know about his background, about why he’d eventually decided to transfer out of Region 8. He’d done his research on her, so she would’ve done the same, especially with her NOPD resources. He’d lay odds his file was a lot thicker than hers, and it wasn’t just that he’d been an agent longer.

“You mean the case that involved my brother because I shot him? Yeah, that one.”

“Okay.” She paused. A long pause. “Can I ask why you want to revisit the files?”

Oh hell, maybe it would help to talk about it. “I caught a glimpse of Eva Savoie’s killer, right?”

“Your description was pretty generic. Not a lot to go on.”

True enough. “Yeah, well, the Broussard men aren’t very distinctive, I guess.”

Jena came to stand in front of him. He was six-two and she could almost look him in the eye, which was unsettling. Her expression had edged out of the shadows, and her brows contracted in a frown. “What are you saying, Gentry? What are you
not
saying?”

Deep breath; just get it out. “The killer was a dead ringer for my brother Lang, no pun intended.” He looked past her into the darkness of Bayou Terrebonne. A shrimp boat rocked gently in the water, its white nets illuminated by the streetlight like misshapen spiderwebs. “I know it sounds nuts. Lang’s dead. We buried him.”

Jena shook her head. “No, you had a funeral. You didn’t bury him, though, did you? His body wasn’t found.”

She’d definitely done her homework, and the fact they’d worked together for three months without her even hinting at what she knew upped his respect for her.

He huffed and ran his fingers along his jawline. He hadn’t talked about that night in almost three years. For six months before that, he’d done nothing
but
talk about it—to the department psychiatrist, to his mom, and then to Warren Doucet and the region’s captain up in Thibodaux, who wanted to make sure Gentry’s head was screwed on straight before he offered him the position in Region 6 that let Gentry come home. Until then, he hadn’t realized how badly he wanted to come back to the parish.

“Lang was strung out that night.” Gentry spoke softly. “Really strung out. He’d been screwed up for a long time, but the drug use had gotten worse. That night, he had a gun and a nothing-to-lose attitude.”

He and his LDWF partner had been doing what started as a routine boat check in bad weather, not expecting to find a haul of drugs in the small trawler. Lang had been on the aft deck, on guard over the fishing tanks full of drugs.

“What went wrong?”

“He tried to bluff me. He took aim at my partner, thinking I wouldn’t call his bluff. Lang was sure his baby brother wouldn’t shoot him.” In his nightmares, Gentry always saw the defiance on his brother’s face turn to shock when he saw the kid he’d always called Gent raise his weapon and fire without hesitation. “I put two bullets in him. I didn’t miss.”

Jena nodded. “And he went over the back end of the boat?”

The ship had been tossing like a kid’s toy in that maelstrom. “I don’t see how he could’ve survived with those wounds in those conditions. We were at the tail end of a tropical storm and the river was as rough as I’ve ever seen it.”

Rough and wide and deep. The Mighty Mississippi had earned its nickname that night.

“Well, you weren’t that close to Eva’s killer and he was wearing a hood. It’s probably just somebody who looks like your brother.” Jena fished her truck keys out of her pocket. “But yeah, I’ll get the digital files sent to me and send them to you on the down-low. But there are two things I want in return.”

“Name them.” He appreciated not only her not being judgmental, but also the way she’d nudged him through his story without pushing.

“Keep me in the loop, Gentry—no going rogue. Talk to the lieutenant. Tell Warren what you just told me. It’s probably got nothing to do with your brother, but on the off chance that it does, Warren needs to know. Let him make the call as to whether or not it goes to the region’s captain or the sheriff, but don’t let him get blindsided.”

Damn it, she was right and he knew it. Warren deserved that consideration and more for taking a chance on the youngest son of his first partner, “Big Hank” Broussard. Warren was only in his midforties, but he had his shit together. He was no-nonsense but fair and, in his way, kind.

Gentry took a deep breath of the heavy night air and watched the shrimp boat for a few moments. “Agreed. Let me look at the files, and I’ll talk to Warren.”

He didn’t look forward to either one.

Before heading back to Montegut and a pile of paperwork, Gentry decided to take a short jaunt west to Dulac. If somehow, by some miracle, Lang had survived that night, he would come back here, return to his old stomping grounds. It was possible that, even if he were alive and laying low around Dulac, he wouldn’t know Gentry was back in Terrebonne Parish. They had never run in the same circles. Just after Gentry graduated high school, Mom had moved to Shreveport with her second husband—Louis the accountant—and Gentry’s two stepsisters; he had few ties in Dulac from the old days. Four years older, Lang by then had been deeply immersed in his small-town gang, picking up day jobs on the shrimp boats to make ends meet.

More than anything, though, when a person was hurt and needed to lick his wounds, he went home, or whatever passed for home. It was why Gentry had wanted the job in Terrebonne so badly. Lang would have the same instincts. He’d fallen in with a loser crowd here in Dulac. He’d gotten his first taste of alcohol and drugs here. It was home. It was where he’d go if he needed to hide out and regroup.

For the next hour, Gentry cruised up and down streets and alleyways along Bayou Dulac, looking for the beat-up shitpile of a boat that had been at Eva’s house last Saturday morning. He drove to Lang’s old haunts, or at least the ones he knew about that were still there. Many had been washed away by the steady procession of hurricanes that had flooded the parish over the last decade: Lili, Katrina, Rita, Gustav, Ike, Isaac.

He pulled the truck into a convenience-store lot and went inside to buy a soft drink; the sight of a skinny kid with buzzed white-blond hair and an armful of tats reminded Gentry of a name he hadn’t thought about in years. Tommy Mason had been Lang’s best buddy back in the days after high school. Gentry would be sweating on the football practice field with the Terrebonne Tigers as a sophomore running back and see Lang and Tommy through the fence, hanging out in the parking lot, smoking Marlboros and who knows what else. Even then, they’d been on different life tracks, and Gentry’s idolatry of his older brother had long faded.

Using the computerized unit mounted to his truck’s center console, Gentry ran a simple Internet search for a Thomas Mason in the parish and got three hits—one with a Dulac address.

He had a lot of reports to write, but Gentry couldn’t resist tracking down the current home of Tommy Mason, if it was even the same guy. The house was a raised modular rectangle on Shrimpers Row, about a mile south of town and west of the bayou. Like the rest of the parish, Dulac had been dealt a hard blow by Hurricane Ike in 2008. The whole parish had been underwater, and, as was usual in hurricane flooding situations, LDWF agents were all-in with search-and-rescue efforts.

Those who stayed rebuilt higher, and it looked like Tommy Mason had been one of them. Gentry’s place in Montegut was a little bigger and a little higher, but not by much. The house was dark, and no vehicles were home. Also no boat. It might be a long shot, but Gentry’s gut told him that if Lang were somehow alive and back in the parish, Tommy would know.

Gentry wanted the element of surprise, though, so he wouldn’t leave a business card as he’d do if his visit were any kind of official matter. Instead, he’d try again tomorrow before going on shift. This highly unofficial call needed to be done on his own time, and if he got even a whiff that Tommy was lying or covering for Lang, he wouldn’t promise to follow the rules.

CHAPTER 8

Ceelie woke up with her cheek resting on an ax handle and a handle-shaped indentation on her face that took a lot of scrubbing to erase. She’d slept with the rusty ax and two knives—a fish-cleaning blade under her pillow and a butcher knife beneath the mattress, handle out.

Near the top of her to-do list today, following visits to the health department to pick up Tante Eva’s death certificate and the parish probate office to talk about the estate: buy a gun, or at least a new ax.

She knew how to shoot. Her dad had never been a hunter, but he’d indulged his daughter’s desire to learn and signed her up for a gun-safety class offered by the sheriff’s office when she was fourteen or fifteen. She was rusty, but figured she could practice on any buzzards that happened to show up outside her door.

Because if the appearance of a
carencro
had freaked her out enough to make her sleep with an ax, she figured her subconscious was not-so-subtly telling her to find an adequate means of self-protection. She might be Eva Savoie’s great-niece, but she was also Gary Savoie’s daughter, which meant she was practical enough to understand that salt would only protect her so far.

The probate office didn’t open until ten, so Ceelie had a couple of hours to kill before leaving; she’d always been an early riser. First on the agenda was convincing herself to reopen the doors and windows and let in some fresh air. The sun was already bright, but the morning held a touch of coolness that caressed her skin when she finally worked up the nerve to step onto the porch. Nothing looked out of place, but she tensed at the sound of an outboard motor.

After an agonizing ten or twenty seconds that felt more like an hour, a boat came into view and Ceelie let out a whoosh of relief. She could tell by the gear and the two guys throwing casual, disinterested waves as they passed that they were fishing. Maybe they were fishing for gators, maybe for gar, maybe for catfish. But not for Eva Savoie’s heir.

She needed to stop being a paranoid idiot. Other than the appearance of a common predatory bird and her own rampaging imagination, there was no reason to think Tante Eva’s killer would have any interest in her. He had been looking for something specific, or such was the consensus of the authorities, since money had been left lying around and the cabin had been turned inside out.

The killer had probably gotten what he wanted. After all, he’d been leaving when Gentry Broussard had spotted him. Otherwise, the sexy warden would’ve caught him in the act, still on the prowl for whatever he sought.

Even if the killer hadn’t found what he’d been looking for, the murderous SOB should have done his homework. So he’d know Celestine Savoie hadn’t set foot in Louisiana in ten years. If he had half the brain God gave him, he’d realize that she couldn’t have any useful information.

Last night, she had let superstition get the best of her, plain and simple. Her days back in Terrebonne had been filled with charity-funeral arrangements, legal matters, cleaning up bloodstains, and running from memories. Time to get real and decide what to do with the rest of her life. She sure didn’t plan to spend it around Whiskey Bayou, sleeping with an ax.

After a tepid shower, Ceelie downed two cups of Eva’s nasty instant coffee made with water boiled on the ancient white GE stove. She’d kept her clothes in her suitcase since arriving, not wanting either to stain them with blood and bleach or, maybe, to admit to herself that she might be here a while. Now she admitted it. She doubted that people were lined up to buy a spit of land in a place that turned into an island practically as soon as the skies turned dark.

Until she sold the land, she couldn’t afford to leave.

Now, she dumped out her pathetic excuse for a wardrobe on the bed and surveyed her options. What hadn’t fit in the suitcase, she’d bagged up before leaving Nashville and set in the hallway for Goodwill to pick up. Only the two pieces of furniture remained in the apartment.

Which meant, on some level, she’d known this move was permanent, at least as far as Tennessee was concerned. She didn’t know where she’d go next, but without rent to worry about and with the money she’d found scattered around Tante Eva’s cabin—
her
cabin—she could survive long enough to decide. Austin had a healthy music scene, and Texas might look more kindly on Cajun hippie music than Nashville.

Her best jeans were clean, so she pulled those on, along with one of her few tops that weren’t long-sleeved, T-shirts, or tanks. The scoop-necked knit was black with three-quarter sleeves, which meant it would hold every bit of heat and she’d be sweating like a wild boar by the time she coaxed the dinosaur of a pickup all the way to Houma. Shopping was on her to-do list, but for food, not clothes. Clothes were a luxury.

At a quarter of ten, she grabbed her purse and the set of keys she’d found in Tante Eva’s tattered black handbag that the woman must’ve been carrying around since the 1960s. In a nod to her paranoia of the previous night, Ceelie closed and locked all the windows and tried odd keys on the key ring until she found one that fit the front door. In her earlier outings, she hadn’t felt the need to lock the place.

Maybe she’d really splurge with the paranoia and buy a new deadbolt while she was in Houma.

It occurred to her, as she rounded the porch to reach the driveway and the old pickup, that Tante Eva had once owned a boat. Anyone living out here with a lick of sense would have a boat, since the roads went underwater so easily. Maybe when Nonc LeRoy had decided to put on his walking shoes, he’d taken off in the boat and that’s how Tante Eva ended up with the pickup. Had they worked out who’d keep what, or had LeRoy just left, or had Eva thrown him out?

Those answers, Ceelie figured she’d never know.

She did get some answers at the probate office, however. Since Tante Eva had died without a will, and Celestine Savoie was listed as the only surviving next of kin on the sheriff’s paperwork and the death certificate, Ceelie only had to fill out a pile of forms and wait for ownership of the cabin and its contents to officially transfer to her. That was the smaller portion of her inheritance; the most valuable was the title to ten acres of land in Terrebonne Parish. The transfer process would take about a month, if no one showed up to contest it after the notice ran in the Houma paper.

Just like that, she was a property owner. Never mind that most of her ten acres was swamp. If she decided to keep it, she could lease hunting rights in different seasons and make a steady little income, or at least that’s what the woman in the probate office had told her. She’d also said Ceelie would have to check with one of the local game wardens to find out the exact regulations.

For better or worse, she knew a couple of local game wardens.

Ceelie had spotted a Walmart on the way into Houma, so she stopped and picked up a deadbolt lock, a few groceries, and the largest container of unrefined salt she could find, just in case another flying bag of feathers gave her the willies and she felt the need to cast some more serious juju.

Ceelie would try to be mature about the whole bad-vibe thing, but at the end of the day, she was Eva Savoie’s great-niece and had learned at a young age about the protective powers of a handful of Morton Salt, preferably without iodine.

Speaking of protection, Ceelie sat in the Walmart parking lot and reconsidered the wisdom of buying a gun, although she’d noticed a couple of sporting-goods stores and a gun shop on the way into Houma. It had been so long since she’d fired one, however, that she stood a good chance of ending up as one of those idiots brought into the emergency room after having shot off her own toes. Plus she had no medical insurance.

No gun, then. She climbed out of the truck and went back inside the Walmart, this time heading for the sporting-goods department. It took less than a minute for her to admit she knew nothing about knives and throw herself on the mercy of a bored store employee with a nametag that read “Dave.”

“What you need depends on what you want to use it for,” Dave said, settling his focus on her chest. Dickhead. “You wantin’ to skin a boar or peel a tater?”

Ceelie narrowed her eyes. “I want it to use on an intruder in my house out on Whiskey Bayou, seeing as how my Tante Eva Savoie the voodoo queen has been murdered,” she said, giving him a sweet smile in response to his widening eyes. “You know, as a fail-safe to cut out his heart with in case my own spell doesn’t work.”

Five minutes later, she was back in the truck with a brutal-looking tactical knife that would make a much better bed-buddy than the rusty old ax. She also had a scrap of paper on which Dave the Walmart salesman had scribbled his phone number. Turned out he was fascinated by voodoo rather than fearful of it, was turned on by a woman with enough confidence to cut out a beating heart, and thought they could have some fun together.

Ceelie thought so too. When hell froze over. She wadded up Dave’s phone number and threw it in a Dumpster on her way out of the parking lot.

The twenty-mile drive south from Houma led her toward a blackening sky, with cloud-to-ground lightning already streaking in the distance.

A prickly sensation crossed her shoulder blades when she finally pulled into the long drive leading to the cabin. Nothing appeared out of place at the back of the house, so her unsettled feeling could probably be blamed on the weather. The sky had turned an ugly charcoal gray; even ordinary thunderstorms could be fierce here at the bottom of the world.

At least it would cool things down for a few hours. Ceelie had spent her cheap-AC-unit money on the overpriced knife.

She gathered her bags and papers, pushed the truck door shut with her hip, and made it to the protective overhang of the wraparound porch in time to escape the first raindrops. They fell in big, fat plops, slowly at first and, within seconds, so hard that visibility dropped to two feet, max.

A faint odor of cigarette smoke hung in the thick, humid air. Intent on looking for any signs of movement in the swamp or the sign of a smoker in a boat, Ceelie rounded the corner of the porch to the front of the house and didn’t stop until something wispy brushed past her nose and cheek.

She let out an
eep
and froze a breathless second before backing up. A human skull hung from a frayed rope tied onto a hook in the porch ceiling, the dirty, worn strands of fiber woven through the eye sockets. It hung low enough for her to look the thing right in the eyes, or could if it had eyes. About half of its yellow teeth had been broken off. It swung toward her, propelled by the wind from the storm.

A tingle of adrenaline raced up her back and across her scalp. She did a slow one-eighty, looking for anything else out of place, and dropped her bags with a clatter when her gaze came to rest on the front door.

GO HOME, BITCH.

The words had been scrawled in red. Paint or blood, Ceelie wasn’t sure. Through the heavy curtain of rain, she scanned the bayou again. Her breath hitched at . . . something. A dark shadow moved through the water close to the opposite bank.

Ceelie had no intention of hanging around to see if it was an alligator or a murderer. She kicked the probate papers and groceries out of the way, grabbed her purse and the plastic bag containing the knife, and raced back to the truck, digging the keys out of her pocket along the way. Once inside, she jammed down the door locks and backed out into the highway, barely missing a tanker truck racing northbound from one of the refineries.

She had to squint to see through the rain that blew in heavy sheets against the windows. People. She needed to find people, which meant going north toward Montegut. She stopped at the first public place she reached—a convenience store and gas station.

Through the Jiffy Stop’s front windows, she could see people moving around the aisles, doing business as usual, talking, laughing. A couple of kids chased each other back and forth under the awning that stretched across the front of the store, holding their arms out into the rain and squealing when they got splashed. Around her, a few other folks sat in their cars, probably waiting for the rain to slacken.

Ceelie’s heart rate slowed, although it was still far beyond normal, a trot instead of a full-on gallop. When she pulled her phone from her purse, her hands shook so badly that she dropped it on the floorboard. A card from her wallet landed beside it: Gentry Broussard’s business card.

“Call me anytime,” he’d said.

She didn’t give herself a chance to rationalize her fear or talk herself out of asking for help. Seeking assistance wasn’t her way, but she wasn’t dealing with a drunk bar patron or a skeezy club owner.

“Broussard.” Gentry Broussard’s deep voice stroked her panic like a reassuring hand, calming her with his casual greeting. When she didn’t answer immediately, his tone grew more clipped. “Is someone there?”

“Yes. I mean, no. Yes. It’s Ceelie Savoie.” God, her voice sounded like that of a frog, and now that she had him on the line, she didn’t know where to start. “Somebody was at the cabin.”

Lame. So lame.

“First, are you in immediate danger?”

Ceelie looked around her. “No, I don’t think so.”

His voice was solid, warm, and dead calm. Her trembling slowed and the tension in her shoulders eased. “Okay, tell me what happened, Ceelie. Someone showed up at the cabin? You’re not there now, are you?”

“No, not there now.” She took a deep breath. “Somebody was at the cabin. He hung a skull, wrote on the door in blood. Maybe paint. There was cigarette smoke.” God, she was making no sense. She took another deep breath. For a woman who prided herself on her independence, she was coming across like a helpless victim. That thought was enough to help center her.

“Where are you now?” Over the phone, she heard a crunch of gravel, then the slam of a heavy door and an engine roaring to life. “I’ll come to you.”

She looked up at the sign on the front of the convenience store. “I’m at the Jiffy Stop on Highway 55 about a mile north of the cabin.”

“I’m on my way from Montegut. Sit tight.” He paused and it sounded like he took a curve fast. “Don’t go back to that cabin until I get there.”